Akitio Thunder3 Duo Pro review: External RAID that’s as fast as internal SATA - grayhollices

At a Glint

Expert's Rating

Pros

Excellent extrinsic SATA RAID performance
Good-looking looks
Stable wide posture

Cons

Expensive
Thunderbolt 3 is overkill for SATA Foray

Our Verdict

This is perhaps the fastest, direct-attached, threefold-drive RAID international natural enclosure you can buy. However, Thunderbolt 3 is expensive overkill for the far slower SATA. USB 3.1 will do the occupation, and for a mickle less.

Want internal SATA speed without having to pry open your computer? Well, it will cost you, but Akitio's $400 Thunder3 Distich Pro external RAID enclosure (which you can encounte for $353 on Amazon River) testament do the trick so approximately. With two drive bays, and the ability to function in RAID 0 (fast/stripy), Foray 1 (rubber/mirrored), SPAN (concatenated storage), and as two furcate disks, the enclosure is also quite versatile.

Hardware

Unlike its cousin, the spectacularly fast Thunder3 PCIe SSD, the Duo Pro is low-profile. That is, it orients its dual bays horizontally. As the unit is capable of housing 3.5-inch hard drives, the wide position is lot safer. If you've never knocked over a effort enclosure while drives are spinning… Err, let's just say the event tends to be bad for the drives—and your data.

The styling of the Thunder3 series, including the Duo In favou, is reminiscent of the Macs of few years ago. That's a good thing in terms of looks, but a bit odd since Oculus sinister X and Macs Don River't support Thunderbolt 3. Unheeding, the silver-with-perforated-metal cuticle is okay in my book. I wish some of my NAS boxes were as hypnotic.

thunder3 duo pro4 — The broad-brimmed stance makes the Akition Thunder3 Duo Pro safer when you utilize hard drives.

The back of the Twosome Pro is household to two Thunderclap 3 ports (non to be confused with USB 3.1 which also uses a Type C connection), a DisplayPort 1.1 port, and a holy USB 3.1 (older 5Mbps) Type B port. Yes, USB 3.x is confusing. There's as wel an AC jack every bit there's no way to run ii problematical drives or SSDs off of bus top executive alone.

Also on the back up is a small rotary switch to set the loge's RAID, operating theater non-RAID, modal value. Inside is Intel's Alpine Rooftree control. While that chip supports DisplayPort 1.2, Akitio informed me that its had issues with some 1.2 displays, so support is limited to DP 1.1. Kudos for honesty—not something we see out of all company. You can put your display in DP 1.1 mode and it will work fine running off of Akitio's Thunder3 series enclosures.

Adding drives is super simple. Unscrew the two large, jailed thumbscrews on the back of the box, slide the overcompensate bump off, slide the drives in, and jailer them down with the same type of intent rif screws. It's the slickest, neatest, easiest system I've come crossways, and I've seen more a few. Once I was accustomed it, I could switch out a pair of drives in a smaller over two minutes. First-class design job, Akitio.

Performance

There's little to no remainder between an internal SATA RAID setup and the Thunder3 Couplet Pro in terms of performance. We tested the unit with both hard drives (albeit ancient ones) and two OCZ Vector 180 MLC SSDs.

as ssd akitio duo pro — The Akitio Thunder3 Duo Pro is the fastest external SATA enclosure we've tested to date.

With our ii antediluvian platter spinners, we power saw around 250MBps reading and 150MBps writing. We're jolly sure you could set very much break with modern drives so much as the Seagate Barracuda 10TB. Simply any hard driving force is a complete waste of Thunderbolt 3's bandwidth. What you really want to use are SSDs. With those in place, we saw 750MBps reading and 660MBps writing—a lot more like it, though unruffled far less than what Thunderbolt 3 is capable of.

20gb tests akitio duo pro — The Thunder3 Duad In favor of easy bested Atech Ostentate's 3.1 enclosure, and walloped Seagate's USB 3.0 Musical accompaniment Summation Locked, though both those products are well cheaper.

Note that we used an Asus X99 Extreme motherboard and Asus Thunderex 3 enlargement card for testing. We didn't test the box via USB 3.1 (older Gen 1 5Mbps), but it would obviously execute slower. The unit is removed too costly to buy for use with the older technology—USB is enclosed merely for compatibility.

Note that in improver to not existence compatible with Operating system X and the Mack, you can't boot from the Thunder3 Duo Pro.

Conclusion

Equally very much like I like the Thunder3 Duette Pro, it's both big-ticket and technological overkill. In that respect's no way SATA drives, especially those that depend on spinning disks, will significantly nick the bandwidth offered by Thunderclap 3. You can go only as fast for much less cash with something like Atech Jiffy's USB 3.1 (10Mbps) VX-2SSD.

However, at least with a pair of SSDs, the Thunder3 Pair Pro leaves no dubiousness that you're getting just about the high-grade SATA RAID performance come-at-able. And, you get a DisplayPort porthole, good looks, American Samoa well as the quickest screw-down climbing arrangement in universe. If the price doesn't annoyance you, have at it.